Quartz Compositor - Quartz Extreme

Quartz Extreme

Mac OS X v10.2 introduced Quartz Extreme: graphics processor (GPU) acceleration for the Quartz Compositor. With Quartz Extreme, no central processor (CPU) cycles are utilized for scene composition. Quartz Compositor runs using the graphics processor (GPU) by encapsulating each rendered backing store in an OpenGL texture map or surface. The GPU then composes the surfaces and maps to provide the final image, which is delivered to its frame buffer.

Quartz Extreme only uses OpenGL commands, and requires a graphics card connected to an AGP 2X or faster bus (including AGP 4X, 8X, and PCI Express), supporting textures and maps of arbitrary size, since many of the renderers have no size limitation (Quartz 2D for example). It is automatically enabled on Mac systems with one of the following types of graphics cards:

• AMD (ATI) Radeon, AGP-based, 16MB VRAM minimum, or better
• NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, 16MB VRAM minimum, or better